The Characters of Your Fear: What Happens in Your Body When You Are Afraid

Fear works in your brain the way local firefighters might work in a small coastal town in June.

Imagine this…

Your brain’s gossip-in-chief, Thalamus, wakes to thick smoke engulfing his house. He picks up his cellphone and texts Amygdala, the fire chief, who also happens to be his brother-in-law. Amygdala instantly dispatches an engine company led by his trusted lieutenant, Hypothalamus, to the scene. Hypothalamus has trained his firefighters to react in one of three ways: (1) fight—i.e., douse the fire source with a gush of water to put it out, (2) flight— i.e., put their safety first and exit if there’s an explosion or a threat that could jeopardize them, or (3) freeze— i.e., immobilize—do not proceed if there is danger in entry. Watch my eye-opening video and see how the full story plays out.

These are the characters of your fear:

• Thalamus, your vigilante, receives stimuli from your senses: your eyes, nose, ears, tongue, skin. He decides where he sends his treasure
  trove of information. And like any trusty old gossip, he usually dispatches it to more than one source.
• Amygdala, the fire chief, determines the possible threat, and triggers the Hypothalamus.
• The Hypothalamus—the lieutenant—prefers to act first, ask later.
• As far as the investigative team of your prefrontal cortex, Sensory Cortex is the interpreter of sensory data, while Hippocampus retrieves conscious memories, processes stimuli, and establishes required context. She is the question asker: where have I seen this before? Is this linked to the weather? What other information did that dirty old Thalamus give us? She is the reason you can calm down later. And like you’d expect from a wise old woman, she stores up all those fear memories so that she can add to her database, Amygdala, the Fire Chief, also gets a copy of the memory store.

You don’t need to know any of this to overcome fear. So why am I telling you this?

Fear is an inbuilt instinct. Your brain’s responses are autonomous. Even in the case of a false alarm, your brain is wired to trigger a fearful response: fight, flight, or freeze. It’s not your fault. It is the way you were built. But if you can wait for the investigators to kick in, you might find that there is little to be afraid of.

In our day to day life, if we get a false alarm, it’s ok. Eventually, our prefrontal cortex kicks in and we realize that we are not in danger.

In deep water, it’s another story. If we get a false alarm and panic, in our panic state, we are not attentive to close our mouths and nose and we may inhale water. Inhaling water is the beginning of drowning. That means that the brain working the way it should with a false alarm could kill us in deep water.

This is why it’s important to learn the Five Firm Foundations For Freedom From Fear, which teaches you how to avoid panic and learn to enjoy yourself in water. The course can be found here.